THE RELENTLESS INDIFFERENCE OF THE WORLD

THE RELENTLESS INDIFFERENCE OF THE WORLD

The relentless indifference of the world

to the monkeys who think they’re in charge.

How does a human skull not rot like a feral dog’s

killed by wolves? Babies die like a carillon

of columbine above their cribs. I see

through the camouflage of my little hill

of a vantage point, ants on the Ho Chi Min Trail

carrying away the piecemeal wings of the butterfly

for scrap metal spare airplane parts. We’re

on the menus of all other forms of life.

Poachers would kill the white elephant

of the moon for its tusks, black bears

for their medicinal livers, stem cells for body parts.

All branches of knowledge, frayed ends

of the lightning unwinching its bucket of rain

on the root fires of dendritic axons in the garden.

Dark matter perishing into its moment

of radiant flowering like English ox-eyed daisies

and stars. Maybe being born into this world

is the shallow death of a black hole in labour?

As much of the elm underground as there is above.

Six million leaves in the beaming sunshine

feeding the dark that scatters them like birds

from a fountain, words from a poet’s mouth

that grow old and die like solar panels erected

on the far side of the moon that lives on starlight alone.

Death can be as useful as roadkill to a turkey vulture.

Hominids lapping marrow for bigger brains

from the charnel houses of the predators

they most fear when they risk extermination

out of the trees being culled by the encroaching grasslands.

Everybody’s too busy running from it

to look death straight in the eye to see

deeply into the black mirror they can’t find

their reflection in, as if you couldn’t shine

without a shadow telling you what time it is.

If I lose my eyes do you think that will

bring about subtle, but lasting changes in the light

adjusting the filaments and stamens of the way

things flower for reasons you were meant to take

as a guess you could build on like a tent

with a portable threshold like a meandering crosswalk

instead of institutionalizing your creation myths?

I have an innate mistrust of the lies that back up

certainty, including the lie behind the alibis

of the tenured sceptic. Dubito ergo sum. Doesn’t

leave you much of a leg to stand on

like a mountain village gathering foundation stones

from the last earthquake. Or a Mongolian

pyramid of skulls promising you an afterlife

to assuage your surrender. Some are washed

in the blood of the lamb and some the goat.

What was pagan about the Romans who bathed

in the blood of a bull? I wash in my own tears

and that’s as close to capitulation as I ever get.

No doubt I may be about to blend into the Great Mystery

with a lot of regret, but, to hear my mother tell it,

I wasn’t too happy when I got here anyway,

and except for a few malignant Catholics who

imputed sin to my original nature, if, in fact,

that’s where things begin, I was innocent as far as it goes

in a world that cuts off its nose to extol

the righteousness of its toes in an infantile mouth.

May be a blessing. May be a curse. Maybe

one foot in the boat, one on shore, and a topknot

tied to a low hanging bough on the tree of life

like a ghost with a dislocated hip and a limp.

Who cares? The river’s running full out of the garden,

and the leaves are better poets than the wind

ever imagined them to be according to modern standards.

They don’t seek awards for the folly of their calling.

They don’t keep track of the anthologies of foliage

they’ve been published in. They just give themselves up

to the mad genius of the wind like the flames

of wax candelabra in diaspora that don’t equate death,

like seeds, with exile. The harvest moon in the hands

of the sower without the plough of the Big Dipper

to show her how. And yet there’s grain in the arms

of the Virgin as if her lover were a scarecrow,

driving its equally innocent twin of a scapegoat

further and further out into a wilderness

where the six and eight pointed stars

thrive on the trash of the universe recycling itself.

Maybe I’ll be the reason sacred dung beetles keep rolling

the starmud of the planet up into a larger cranium

to accommodate the fatty abyss they’ve sipped

from my marrow as the ants who drained

the wetlands and watersheds of my eyes

are beginning to conceive of the bigger picture

my mind painted when I look at them like a visionary

that didn’t believe you had to stick to the beaten path

of somebody else’s pheromones, that you could

put out your own little blossom of stargrass

like a sign of amazement you’re still alive and aware of it.

That death wasn’t a closed door anymore than life

was an open gateway into a garden of wild delights.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN THERE WAS WINE IN THE GOURD, NOT VINAIGRETTE

WHEN THERE WAS WINE IN THE GOURD, NOT VINAIGRETTE

When there was wine in the gourd, not vinaigrette,

and we didn’t put a brown paper bag

like an executioner’s hood over the bottle

we drank from each other’s skull like an sos.

Crazy elixirs that tasted like poison at first

until I fell in love with what they turned me into.

And the way you could purr when you were drunk

and I stroked you under the chin like a mantra, aum,

just before we made love to each other as if love

were a sin, not a virtue. Our irrationality was above

the reproach of the little test-tubes and telescopes

taking water sample of our tears to see what

what absurdities polluted us like acid rain.

We made love to each other and we couldn’t

stop laughing at the way people squirreled

their emotions like black walnuts away

in the heartwood of the tree that engendered them.

We weren’t being mean. The humour was existential.

And the last laugh was on all of us.

Just some very serious things seem funny when

you see them from a certain angle, unafraid

of making the same mistake twice, thrice, four times

a night, until there are more embarrassed mirrors

in the house of life than there are mice.

You wore huge moon hoops in your ears

and even your earlobes didn’t break the circle

we were orbiting around each other in

like a binary star system in the grip

of each other’s gravity bridging the gap

between us like a suspension bridge of toffee

or the action of dark matter at a distance

that spun silk mandalas out of its spidery psyche.

I overloaded your server, and you, mine.

After that there was nothing to opine about.

We were selfish, mad children amusing ourselves

with alternative zodiacs the astrologers

had forgotten about like ghost towns when

the moonlight ran out like a silver mine.

With you I lived six months of my life

as intensely as a war torn dragon ever wanted to.

You orgasmed like a supernova in a black hole

that had bitten off more than it could chew.

We exceeded the limits of each other as if

life weren’t fast enough to catch up to our afterbirth

like the light of a star in an ancient galaxy

millions of parsecs away from telling you where

it’s at now. We were finger printed like emission spectra

for the labyrinthine legends of our personal history

and as for the intimate details of the rest, they’re

just going to have to wait until they’re dead

to ride the flying carpet of the flesh

like a wavelength pulled out from under

the noose of sex they tied around their necks

like umbilical cords giving birth to them all the time.

Fire, fire, fire, in my loins that wasn’t fathered

by a mystic note sewn into anyone’s coat

when I see God framed like a woman in a window

fixing her hair for the night, plumping the tresses

of the willow who avers she’s mourned long enough

for deaths and abandonments she can’t do

anything about. Love would make martyrs of us all

if we let it. I wonder if the autumn leaves

ever wonder if they’re dying for something

bigger than they are when they immolate themselves

like moths and loveletters in the candelabra

of a tree they’re drawn to like crows in a winter sunset?

You were the amazing water sylph at the prow

of the moon ploughing the sea like a dolphin.

Seabirds and their reflections burned like kisses

on your shining skin and the poetry didn’t

have a cruising altitude where the worlds level off,

and we, who had drunk from our skulls, knew

of a certainty no one else could do our dying for us

so why let them live our lives, as if

wild grapevines had to grow like English cucumbers.

We were hated for this kind of freedom

to heed ourselves like two hurricanes on nightwatch.

And whenever you were pink, it was

a warning and delight to a seasoned sailor

who wanted to drown more deeply in you

than the moon would ever be able to again.

Love with you wasn’t a reward or a punishment

or training wheels on a dream no one

could make come true and remain

spontaneous about it, which kills it as a gift

and makes it more of a wage, than a windfall.

Our senses lit up like the eyes and fingertips

of enlightenment emerging from the dark like stars

we were quantumly entangled in like

the old moon in the new moons arms, or lovers

in a sacred hotel room that didn’t leave bibles

in its drawers for sinners who have trouble

sleeping at night even with the mirrors covered

with veils nobody can see through to the other side.

I never expected you to make the exit that you did

but, then again, every Perseid has its radiant,

and somebody’s got to wish upon a falling star

just to cover their bets in case the emergency

fire alarm breaks its glass ceiling and secularism

isn’t right, and anthropomorphism sees the light

and man is adorned by the garland and the garter

of a female god that fills the mangers

with fledgling messiahs that win their wings

after they fall for her without any spiritual parachutes on

that will return them to earth gently again.

God bless the meteor that wiped me out

like a species that had to change like a raptor into a bird

to be worthy of the moonrise it sang its heart out to.

PATRICK WHITE

THERE'S A WOMAN IN THE DOORWAY

THERE’S A WOMAN IN THE DOORWAY

There’s a woman in the doorway

flaking like a rose of red paint

with eyes that have been weeping

the shadows of dead saints, a full eclipse

of mascara, sloppy sorrows, and a mickey

she quotes like a Bible, chapter and verse,

though the Bible’s mickey-mouse

compared to how bad it can get

as I notice there’s a pink Glock in her purse,

the arthropod of an uncalibrated shrimp

that isn’t going to let her lover off the hook.

I’m engraving poems on the frosty windows

with a crow’s claw as they whisper to me

like the moon among the corals when I dream,

strange omens of incipience I always mistake

for a sign I’m about to cry though it’s seldom

revealed why. The earth is a sad, sad place

sometimes as you’re ushered to your seat

by a starmap of waterlilies that can see in the dark,

a bouquet of wildflowers in a funereal movie-house

at the first screening of a cosmic prequel

featuring your life as you’ve never seen it before.

Reruns in the multiverse, I’m standing

on a million streetcorners all at once

trying to hawk my theory of fiscal surrealism

to a bloodbank trying to hang on to the Iron Age.

I turn the page like an eyelid to exorcise

the ghost of the jinn in the lamp, and the cupboards

are as bare as the vow of a celibate wishing well

the watercolour lovers have lost interest in

now that the stars have evaporated from it

like the spirit of yesterday’s perfume in a purse.

Where is the lost atmosphere of the moon going

like the shrinking ferns and bonsai trees of my breath

as if it were revising nirvanic haiku until all that was left

were parings of nothing, lunar phases

and fingernails of glass that could scratch

your eyes out like nature red in tooth and claw

as you rake wavelengths in the sand

like a Zen garden in Kyoto waiting

for enlightenment to germinate the rocks,

hard-scrabble farmers with almanacs of crystal skulls.

I’ve ploughed the moon monkishly long enough

with a silver tongue to know when

to sow, tend, reap, the skeletal crops

of the dragon’s teeth that police the secret

of a green thumb trying to hitch-hike out of here

on a long, dark, estranged, radiant byway

lacquered in black ice like the gleaming mirrors

of a snake uncoiling like the full eclipse of an oilslick

waiting for me to slip up like an apostate

of my mystical ineptness long after

the last sacred clown sat down on the ground

and had a good laugh on the house

at the expense of the unamused abyss,

remarking how absurdly child-like all this is.

Medusa, armed to the teeth, tries to tell me

she’s tired of crossing swords with her own fangs

over a point of honour someone has to die for

like a crescent of the moon she’s going to pull

out of the mouth of her lyrical liar with pliers,

every one of her vocal cords tarred and feathered

like the black swan of a stone guitar

reverberating in the Martian canyons of her heart.

Ars longa. Vita brevis. Hatred and angry grief

so much easier to master than the impossible art

of keeping your evanescent fireflies of insight

undisciplined enough to ride the lightning

like a pale horse with the wingspan of the universe

without tampering with someone else’s specious curse

or plotting a course by the stars on your Spanish spurs.

Not on the dance-card of her spite and ego,

I listen compassionately to what

the white noise outside is trying to teach me

like the universal hiss of the afterbirth of road kill

about the ontological misfortunes of being born

to long for nightbirds and hear the rattling of crabs

lugging their armaments to the front lines of love

like lunar castanets, or the horns of a bull

narrowing the gap between parentheses

like the clashing dooms of Scylla and Charybdis,

a whirlpool and a rock, gravity and mass,

the crone phase of the moon having it out

with the vernal equinox at a calendrical toredo.

I see the first crescent and I want to put it up

to my head and pull the trigger to put an end

to the incommensurable agonies of fractious decimals

repeating themselves like mantric alibis

until nothing’s left of the original cartel

except the amputated torso of the fire hydrant

that tried to put the blaze out like a voice coach

who didn’t know all the words to the hysterics

of an anonymously amorous narco ballad

mythically inflating the legend of a famous love affair

out of the redoubtable details of a few bad superstitions.

Pity the fool who begrudges even the grubbiest delusions

of the quixotic heart tilting at the stars

like the precessional axis of the wobbling earth

come round again to the eternal recurrence

of the stratagems of spring in a Great Platonic Year.

Love is as much of a companion to death

as murder is to sacrifice or genetics to loaded dice.

House wine or love potion number nine,

pink guns with clips of rose-petaled lipstick,

everyone’s upholding the incriminating honour

of their uncontested heart defended by their folly

to the death as if the mystery were about to be

lost upon them for good as they rend each other asunder

shooting out the stars like a fashionable crime of passion.

As for me and my tent, the dancing girls

with coral lips and wishbone hips have come and gone

like serpentine wavelengths red shifting into

the shadows they left behind like signs of intelligence

alloyed with carnal desire like a nocturnal mirage

of the moon laying its broken sword down on the water

like a vow we didn’t let come between us

as if we didn’t belong to ourselves

which made the theft of fire we stole from each other

a greater blessing than the hurtful consolations

of obedience to the thorns at the expense of the rose.

What can you say about the nature of crazy wisdom

when the heart is bemused enough to cherish someone

barefoot beyond the bounds of common sensical shoes that pinch?

Some people would rather be loved than right.

Others more righteous than touched. Majnun

had his Laila. Love limps beside others like a crutch.

And though he sipped from many goblets

encrusted with star sapphires from the Pleiades,

none of them tasted like the night until he drank

from the reflection of the beloved from his own hands

and knew a darkness brighter than enlightenment

and the music of rain in the eyes of a desert

more beautiful than water imagery on the moon.

The mad man knows a secret even the deepest stars

can’t understand without losing their way to the well.

PATRICK WHITE

IN MOONLIGHT AND RUBBER BOOTS I LOVED YOU

IN MOONLIGHT AND RUBBER BOOTS I LOVED YOU

In moonlight and rubber boots I loved you.

Ladies of the Lake who came like waterlilies

into my life and cast your dark sexual mysticism

over the latest initiate to pass through your veils

like the silhouettes of shepherd moons in transit,

that never edited the shadows out of your loveletters

or deprived the dragons of serpent fire

the new moons that brought on the rain

like the compassionate eclipses of the enlightened

when they show you the way home in the dark

by blowing the candle out. Everyone’s got eyes

but you were the first, as your mindstreams

fell on hard rock, to teach me to throw away

the crutches of light I thought my seeing depended upon

like the flame in a lantern, inside and out,

and flow along with my own visions of life

as if I shone like water on the moon

at the oceanic floodgates of an overwhelming emotion.

In despair, terror, doubt, sorrow, loss and aspiration,

I loved you, I loved the dangers in your raptures

when your intensities threatened to cremate your desires

like a field fire that’s being carried away

by an updraft of itself like a red-tailed hawk

riding its own thermals like aerial stairwells to the top.

Approximation was always more pragmatically true

than perfection and I wanted to live with you

as an indefensible human reasonably at peace with the world

as long as the truce holds. How many times

was I a witness to your desecration of the holiness

of the things you cherished most in life

as if we were on an heretical pilgrimage together

to some unknown shrine of starmud

that would light up heaven in the same fire

you cast hell down into unconfessed.

I loved you even then like the sea loves its weather

whatever its mood, or the sky its clouds and birds,

or an eye that recognizes a star it knows the name of

and can easily pick out from the rest of the crowd in disguise.

Water sylphs, witches, queen of the fireflies,

black apostate madonnas that cried real blood

like roses in the darkness surrounded by thorns,

cowgirl muses and vamps with the bodies of bloodbanks,

Pythian oracles high on the prophetic vapours

of active volcanoes, I have loved each of you

like flesh bound copies of the original mystery of life

I saw published in your eyes the first time

we ever met. Not love at first sight, but the authority

of an intuition something were astronomically bound

to occur between us like a sailor and a sea on the moon.

Each of you, a crystal skull, a chandelier, an open window

into the palatial nature of God drawing up blueprints

for the hovels and estates of water and light.

I could taste more of life in a single tear

you polished like the lens of a third eye

with a nightsky for a cornea, than I could

white-water rafting through the rapids of my mindstream

in the spring run off of my ancestral glaciation

thawing like a mirror to the notion of a lot more warmth

in my life since you plunged like a comet

into the midnight sun with no fear of flaming out like Icarus.

You were the waterbirds of my life, you were

the golden fish that spontaneously jumped into my lifeboat

when the moon had no hooks in the water

and you taught me how to swim out of my depths

by not underestimating myself like a shore-hugger

that refused to go along with the stream

and suffocated under his own weight

like a barnacle the rock it’s anchored to

or a pod of dolphins in a tidal mud puddle.

I’m not even going to try to say thank-you

because gratitude could only sound shabby at best

compared to what I owe you for the blessing

of an insurmountable debt that showed me

the mystic largesse in even the pettiest acts of love

each in its hour and place, were a star

flowering on the river among the waterlilies,

as if what were most enduring and indelible about love

were a light kiss of fire on the face of the waters of life

that leaves no trace of its shining, no starmap

for the albino crows of noon to navigate

their way back to black, nor adds one shadow more

to the darkness of the insight I return my eyes to

from time to time, alone, late at night, in tribute

to the watersheds they were drawn from, the women,

the friends, familiars, companions, the spirits of the well,

the muses, the moondials of the eras of my love I’ve shed

like rose petals and thorns along my path through life,

with no less passion in the lees of the wine that red shifts

tears into blood, than regrets in drinking from mirages

when the wild grapes were blue, under each of their skies

when it was as hard to tell then as it is now, where the deserts

left off and the stars began to add their lustre

like a universe to every mystic detail of a grain of sand

that enlightened the windows with the clarity of what’s

translucently apparent there before them, like the eyes

the stars follow, as I still do theirs, this soft, silver light

of a distant island galaxy that shines deeper into the dark

than the crow flies, or the fledgling arrows of the heart

can hit their mark like the scars of spring in the tree rings

of the lost art of rising to the moment like a candelabra of coral

on the shipwrecked seafloor of an unannounced moonrise.

PATRICK WHITE

LUCID BLUE HOUR OF LEAVES ON THE RIVER

LUCID BLUE HOUR OF LEAVES ON THE RIVER

Lucid blue hour of leaves on the river

drifting by like constellations on a starmap at last.

Falling, they sank to the heights of the unattainable.

Life, for all we try to order it, no less random

than death. Does the becoming ever stop?

Too nice a day to argue ethics with my skeleton.

No end term. But let my bones have the final say

on whether I lived as I had to, not should,

or covertly fulfilled a spiritual vacuum

when I entered my grave like a guest in the doorway.

Lucid blue, but a chill in the air, and everywhere,

the going and the gone, the perishing in the name

of a good cause, same time, same place,

come the spring when the seed dies into

its own flowering gesture of longevity.

I can still hear the birds singing long after

they’ve flown. I’ve got their voice boxes

like empty heron’s nests in the female crucifixes

of the dead trees in a breeding swamp

of runic trinities. Saint Hillary was a Druid at heart.

I was an impoverished golden boy with a Mongolian will

to transcend my uneager beginnings as a fatherless khan.

I brought a new level of reality to the word, mirage,

but now it doesn’t even matter why I’m alive

as I grow like a beard on the wind, cedar smoke

from these pyres I keep starting like root fires

I sit around with my hands apart to the flames

like the wings of a bird rising from its own ashes

in a strange emblem of prayer to a god

I’ve never even heard of before riding

its own updraft like the soul of a man trying

to warm his solitude up a bit with a conversational fire.

The river’s babbling somnambulistically on and on

about how effortless the dreamers think flowing is.

It’s noon, but I see the moon flashing

its sabres of light on the redshifting waves

of the mindstream as it labours like a calendar

to keep up with life. Divide and conquer

and the house falls like Tarot cards unmindful

of their own fault lines. Sequestered in

this hovel of starmud, outside the walls

of a palace of water, I watch the cattails explode

like the stuffing of old couches, the royal thistle

suffering a fluffy kind of senescent dementia.

And it doesn’t matter whether it’s got something

to do with me or not, whether I’m the protagonist

of the ghost stories I keep telling about myself

to the eyes gleaming in the dark like first magnitude stars

taking it all in like absorption spectra, or

they’re making me up on the fly to appease the shadows

that keep protesting why such darkness should

be born of the light as if there were a G-spot

on a single-petalled wild rose you could touch

like a bee that would make it all right as rain and honey.

Take the pain, the darkness, the despair, the struggle

to live inside yourself wholly alive

like a bed and breakfast for suspicious boarders.

Let a little danger ransom you from your ennui

as you grow more homesick, looking at the stars

you left like a pilgrim going off to a war

it was holy to lose, victory to die in the midst of

deluded by the rumours of virgin belly dancers

who said they were more in love with the carnal

than the nuances of the latest eclipses of an enlightened mind.

Pick any night you’ve ever lived as if

you couldn’t live anymore without spilling

out of the moment like tears of bliss

from a housewell deeper than the watershed that fed it.

One life. One encounter with yourself

like a stranger without fingerprints to say

you ever existed, as all those torments

that blasted you like clay brick in the deserts

of an hourglass settle like pyramidal dust on a windowsill.

Look at the leaves blowing down

the abandoned broadways of life like feral playbills

that barked like a dog outside a tent

you had to pay to get a seat in like a first row of teeth.

Sleep on a bed of nails if you have to

and have religious wet dreams of

the linghams and the yonis, the jewel

in the lotus, the yin, the yang, the coincidence

of the contradictories in quantumly entangled

oxymorons who never swore on the light sword

between them to keep a vow the optical illusion

of a bifurcated consciousness made for them.

Don’t give your word like a mighty oak

and then break it like a twig. Even if you regret it

later. The grander the entrance, the cheaper the exit.

It gives the story of your life a chance

to be true to you like an exception to the rule.

But don’t force yourself. Integrity’s the preference

of an aristocratic taste for the excellence

of a blue-blooded wine over a mouthwash of ditch water.

Don’t disappoint the scars of your younger heroics.

When you see the way people suffer as you suffer

and you need a word beyond righteous absurdity

to express how you feel about the mindless agony of life

or die in a futile attempt to shriek it at the stars

as if you were a magnificent bird of prey

with an arrow in your wing, don’t reject

the folly of love you’ve been chosen to die in the name of.

Even the moon’s a maggot that can sometimes

disinfect the trough of the wound

by ennobling the foodchain with a coat of arms

that honours the housefly with a set of wings

for not reviling the running sore of the earth as corrupt.

Waterlilies rot like skunkweed. It’s clear enough.

And it’s true there aren’t many who want

to turn over the occult skull in the prophetic duff

to see what’s going on underneath the impressionist table cloth

they’re picnicking on with courtesans in the grass

as if the waters of life had never heard of autumn

as the nightbirds pine for paramours beyond

the stations of their voices like troubadours in vain,

longing and desire, the ghost in the flame

ignoring the storms that will blow its candle out

like a lighthouse that disobeyed its own warnings

and, at the very least, deepened the madness of being alive.

PATRICK WHITE

STARS TONIGHT AND THE TRAIN WHISTLES JUST PASSING THROUGH

STARS TONIGHT AND THE TRAIN WHISTLES JUST PASSING THROUGH

Stars tonight and the train whistles just passing through,

not dying like some wounded animal, a mammoth in a tarpit

beset by dire wolves just as the ice-age is taking its hand

off the throats of the rivers and returning the world to trees,

no drunks or teenagers lying across the tracks, no accidents

or suicides with loved ones leaving flowers and photographs

on the spot where it happened too late, too late, and no one

in a small town really able to relate to such a universal absence

like the death of the larger mammals when spring is at the gate.

I listen for the music of fate, and I’m almost always ready to dance,

but sometimes when I consider the erosively random indifference of chance

I speak as if I had to keep a tight grip on my molecules

or dissipate into space myself with no nebular aspirations

of ever becoming a star to shine a little light

on what I’m doing here as if I just bought drinks for the house,

though I’m never quite sure what I’m trying to celebrate,

but it’s enough to start a riot of sacred clowns

laughing on a winter night as they put each other down

as if the only way they could bluff themselves into having a little fun

were to put callouses on their smiles, and talk tougher than they are.

And over the course of time, the scars prove as hurtful as the wounds.

Atrocities turn into local stories and the asylums are abandoned

to the ghosts of the mad who murdered the nurse

in the moonlit flash of an axe you can still see ninety years later

if you’re driving by alone on a starless night in late February.

It’s the commonality of it all that makes it chronically appalling.

It’s the sententious acceptance of death as if it had already

been achieved sooner than later, and sooner waste your last breath

on the ashes of a dying fire than wonder why

intimately specific human beings turbulent with life

are forgotten as carbon copies of us as they’re fossilized

and remembered, if at all, as the narrative themes of morbid legends,

or nacreously glazed in mother of pearl as if the dawn were never false.

I can’t see the bright side of a black hole through the temple

of a universe that’s playing Russian roulette with itself,

but I can hear the tumblers of a solar system falling into place

on a safe full of secrets for my eyes only as if some things

came to light like undertakers chalking the faces of the cosmetically dead.

Lifemasks and strawdogs and scarecrows thrown

on the ritual fires of the crematorium after the sacrifice is said

to make the living feel better about having their hearts cut out.

Whatever gets you through the night. Aquatic Byron

reaching into the pyre to pull Shelley’s drowned heart out of the flames.

The way I seek a deeper solitude than death out in the nearby woods

where I always feel like an exile with a homeless heart

looking up at the stars like a handful of sacred dirt in a medicine bag

I’ve been saving for years to throw on my own grave

I’m holding up to the abysmal impersonality of the nightsky,

not to have it blessed by a consolation prize, but to give

the unresponsive silence of the alphas and omegas of the mystery

a taste of my humanity even if they spit me out as a bitter kind of light.

I will shine. Without a lantern. Without a firefly. Without

a guiding star. Without a radiant familiar in a desolate place.

If nothing else, I’ll keep adding my paint rag to the big picture

of the dark until I grow eyes to look beyond the obvious mirrors,

part the curtains, lift the veils, kiss the eyelids of the new moon

until the dead wake up like an eclipse of black roses

blooming in their blood, turn the trilithons of Stonehenge

until it’s aligned with the vernal equinox and the dead return

like migrating birds to the innocence of their childhoods

and the coffins they were buried are disinterred like toyboxes.

PATRICK WHITE

THE BEAUTIFUL ARTIFICE DESTROYED

THE BEAUTIFUL ARTIFICE DESTROYED

The beautiful artifice destroyed,

is the ugly one any less fictional?

O the glow of wisdom on a disappointed man’s face.

Auroral veils in the ashes of flypaper cobwebs.

You can know someone who’s lived well

by whether children are happy around them or not.

Bleak concrete and arterial air ducts

painted red so every grey day’s got its poppy,

more like a bunker than a peripatetic perch

of higher learning. A perch for nesting missiles.

Military-industrial. Everywhere the inert gases

of the overhead lights interrogate you

overenthusiastically. Que sais je? Nothing.

Incriminated by a metaphor that ratted her out,

I heard a writer say every time she came across

some unexpected jewel of language, she

plucked it out before the Taliban splashed acid

in its eyes. Flowers aren’t allowed at a funeral,

but the asters still crowd around the muskrat

like roadkill, death and the beautiful united

in belief. And to judge from the silky, sunken

eye-sockets, the minimalist ants extol squinting

over seeing the same way. A local habitation

and a name, ok, but GPS is not a starmap

and o little journey, a step across the threshold

is only so many miles to an inch. Desecration

is hitching thoroughbreds to the bullet proof hearse

plagiarized from the sun god’s chariot. Inspire

a matchbook, you might flare for a moment,

but nothing of any consequence is going to go down

in flames. Speak for yourself like the voice

of a species. Who cares how many mammoth bones

or shoes you’ve got in the closet of your psyche?

You can look at a field and at first all you can see

is a blur of golden hay the wind is polishing

to a sheen you can breathe on like the skin of a lover,

and then, stars emerging, the wildflowers begin to come out.

I like to listen to what they’re saying in their sleep.

I don’t feel a compulsion to run and uproot them

because some nitwit’s got a writing style

that doesn’t include them. All gate, and no garden.

Even the weeds will surprise you with what

they know about flowering if they’re left

to their own resources. I got up one morning

and was mystically mauled by the New England asters

in the apple orchard caught in a bolt of sunlight,

a black bear among the ungathered windfall,

as shocked as I was to stare into the eyes

of another mammal there, doing what I was.

Biting into the amazing sweetness of the same

sacred syllables, jewels glistening on our lips

like the firesticks of diamonds raining

on Saturn and Jupiter as for one brief moment

we understood each other like apple juice

and the strange elixirs of September that

make fools out of the wasps too comatose to fly.

PATRICK WHITE